If you’re the parent to a Star Wars–crazy kid who loves LEGO (the Venn Diagram of these two tastes is close to a perfect circle), or a child-at-heart who adores one or both of these brands, you may not know about the LEGO Death Star soon to enter orbit. But for a more devoted subset of LEGO fans, the upcoming playset has been the subject of online rumors, argument, speculation, disappointment, and ire—a hype cycle that’s been churning for almost a year and concludes next week, when LEGO releases its first thousand-dollar set.
Yep. That’s the price. On October 4, you can buy a single LEGO set for the tidy—though certainly not small—sum of one thousand actual US dollars. The long-awaited, oft-rumored, LEGO Ultimate Collector’s Series Death Star is a very large and very expensive toy. The set contains 9023 pieces, weighs almost fifteen pounds, and represents the most expensive plaything in the history of the brand. Technically priced at $999.99, it is also not the largest LEGO set ever (their Eiffel Tower is taller) nor does it have the most pieces (an elaborate LEGO World Map set features 12,000).
It’s not even the first (or third) LEGO Death Star: the brand has made earlier versions of Star Wars’ most famous planet-sized weapon, which retailed in the $300 and $400 range. But this new Death Star represents a scale and ambition from the LEGO group so large, so costly, and so out-of-this-world that it may potentially establish a new paradigm for the types of premium collectors’ products they can make and sell. Or, like its cinematic inspiration, it may become destructive on an unimaginable scale, pushing devotees of the world’s most popular toy to a new breaking point.
Getting a few things out of the way, speed-round style, for the uninitiated: They’re LEGO bricks, tiles, and plates. They’re not blocks, and they’re especially not called LEGOs, plural. There are also gears, elements, jumpers, brackets, bars, flags, and dozens more named types, a dizzying hierarchy of parts.
There are also minifigures. Some LEGO fans are exclusively fans of minifigures, and LEGO will occasionally include a first-time minifigure or character in a large set as an incentive to purchasers. LEGO Star Wars fans are often minifig-obsessed, and many see the strategy of hiding certain minifigures behind the “paywall” of larger, more expensive sets as exploitative and hypocritical. You can later find these exclusive figures on the aftermarket with heavy mark-ups. (The forthcoming Death Star set comes with 7 exclusives, including Rogue One’s Galen Erso, which means the set also marks actor Mads Mikkelsen’s first appearance in LEGO minifigure form.)
The name LEGO has been commonly genericized, like Kleenex and Xerox and Google, and this brand recognition works as part of the business’s protective moat. Even though LEGO’s patent on their system of injection-molded plastic bricks (studs on the top, tubes underneath) expired in 1978, most people commonly refer to any upturned Tupperware of multicolored bricks as LEGO. Brands like Tyco and Mega Bloks may have flooded the market for decades with generic, passable imitations, but no parent has ever cursed the inventor of Mega Bloks after stepping on one in the middle of the night.
In the 1970s, LEGO would release 40 or 50 unique sets a year—tailored assortments of bricks with printed instructions for the building of specific models, like a rudimentary helicopter, windmill, or a train station. By the late 1980s and early ‘90s, LEGO was producing 200 sets a year, with unlicensed, original themes released in quarterly and yearly cycles, products designed around objects and subjects of imagination, like Castle, Space, and Pirates. When business fell into a drastic slump in the 1990s, LEGO was lucky to find and develop a partnership with Lucasfilm, and things began to turn around.